It’s Twitter’s 7th birthday. Twitter first launched on March 21, 2006. Hard to believe how much the social media scene has changed since then. How different will things be in another 7 years?

Twitter has recently rolled out advertising for small businesses through their business portal, Twitter for Business.  If you are a small business looking to gain more followers and grow your presence on Twitter, perhaps you should consider allocating some of your marketing budget here.

How can you engage with your customers and put Twitter to work for your business.  Advertise on Twitter with these 2 new paid advertising products:

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Social marketing is becoming increasingly more valuable for retailers.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the social networking platforms that are being used to grow business.  The following are key Social Marketing insights for retailers.

Social Marketing can help build customer engagement and product awareness:

Social marketing can help you increase engagement with your online customers, but be sure to choose the appropriate channel based on your goal.  For example, Pinterest is a must for retailers because it is excellent for sharing product images.  As a visual network, it provides great value to retail brands.  It is also important to reach the right people.  Capture core fans and bring them into your social scape via website, emails, shares, and likes within a social network.  To drive awareness to your brand, optimize content to meet brands by using social analytics.  You can do this by determining which posts are receiving the most engagement and creating more content from that.  Continually manage and keep track of your Likes, Shares, Followers, Retweets, and Comments.

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A lot of people wrote Digg off a while back when they launched v3, but v4 was recently relaunched by the new owners, Betaworks with a new emphasis on images. Naturally, a lot of comparisons will be made to Pinterest, since they popularized the vertical tiling style, but it’s definitely a more appealing design than previous iterations.

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Twitter will be implementing a new feature soon called Twitter Cards. This feature will make it possible for websites to attach media experiences when website content is linked via Tweets. For more info, see Twitter Cards.

In terms of marketing, Twitter Cards look to be very beneficial. Some possible benefits include:

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LinkedIn recently revealed that tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn, which ends a two-and-a-half-year partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter. This marks another shift by Twitter to try to keep users on Twitter rather than going through third party applications.

While it could be a major hindrance for a lot of social media sharers who utilized this method for content syndication, we want to take a look at the bright side of this situation. So what are some things that can be done to work around this problem?

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We know that Google has been making a push towards mobile advertising by Introducing Mobile App Inventory in Adwords. We documented some numbers that showed an increase in mobile users and mobile app users, but perhaps it’s the success that Twitter is touting that has spurred this push.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some companies have been finding a lot of success by placing Twitter mobile ads. So much so that Twitter now claims that it is generating a majority of its revenues from mobile ads rather than from Twitter.com.

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Posterous Spaces has just been acquired by social media giant, Twitter.  Posterous Spaces is a publishing blogging platform that is a one-stop shop allowing users to share text, photos, videos, links and other categories of content and ideas. Posterous lets users share publicly or privately by web, email or mobile app.   Its tagline is “sharing smarter” and it has been popular due its simplicity, flexibility and ease of use for fast blogging, multimedia entries and social networking. Posterous is differentiated due to the fact that it is driven by the privacy concerns of its users and places dominance on selective sharing.  It does this by allowing individuals and businesses to create and manage permission-based blogs and photo galleries with controlled access.  Posterous users are in turn sharing many more photos and videos privately versus publicly.  Posterous points out that “private sharing is the future battleground for social networks.”  Posterous competes with other platforms like Tumblr and WordPress.

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Panelist(s): Rob Hahn, Jim Marks, Sherry Chris, Mike Simonsen, Dan Green
@mikesimonsen
@BHGRE_Sherry
@jimmarks
@mortgagereports

What is an ROI?

Traditional ROI = Return on Investment
Social Media ROI = Return on Influence

ROI is a measure on traffic, clicks, and dollars. The basics of ROI is that, how much money you put in is how much you get in return. It can be summed up as such:

Time invested and sphere of influence put into Social Media => Return on Influence => Return on Investment

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In case you haven’t heard, Twitter will officially be supporting the idea of retweets within the coming weeks, as reported here. Retweet is when a tweet is copied and pasted with attribution from another tweet.

From the screenshots provided at the above link, it looks like retweeting will be implemented rather seamlessly, but one question does arise. How will it handle a retweeters comments on the original tweet? A lot of retweets are done with the inclusion of additional comments. If comments won’t be supported, the new retweet support may not be useful to most people. We’ll just have to wait in the coming weeks to see how it all works out.